Hi everyone. Just wanted to get a quick survey of the hardware people are running PCem on. Primarily I would like to know if anyone's running it on a CPU that doesn't support SSE2 (Athlon XP/Pentium III and earlier), however I think it would be useful to get an idea of what level of performance is available to most people.

IMHO, there's no point keeping support for anything that doesn't have at least SSE2 - such computers are over 10 years old, and aren't even useable for web browsing (anything webkit/blink-based won't even run).

IMHO, there's no point keeping support for anything that doesn't have at least SSE2 - such computers are over 10 years old, and aren't even useable for web browsing (anything webkit/blink-based won't even run).

Not quite 100% true. I used my old PC until the end of February 2014 and it did have a 2.4 GHZ Pentium 4 processor with SSE2 support. The PC was upgraded way back in January 2003; memory was upgraded three times from 128 MB to 512 MB, 1.5 GB and then 2 GB respectively. In the end, the old PC was quite usable for web browsing until the very end.

ppgrainbow wrote:Not quite 100% true. I used my old PC until the end of February 2014 and it did have a 2.4 GHZ Pentium 4 processor with SSE2 support.

He was referring to Athlons up to the Athlon64 (~2005) which can't handle Google Chrome and which are out of the range for PCem to emulate a fast machine in anyway. Pentium 4's always had SSE2 from their disasterous 2000 launch. Browsers are fine for these if you don't tab it up or flash it up and don't run into ajax-creep pages. Emulating PentiumMMX 166s with AWE32 and 3dfx cards are not.

Currently the only SSE code in PCem is in the sid player afaik, and I wouldn't mind it if it suddenly started requiring SSE2 for hand-tuned intrinsics and optimization reasons.

ppgrainbow wrote:Not quite 100% true. I used my old PC until the end of February 2014 and it did have a 2.4 GHZ Pentium 4 processor with SSE2 support.

He was referring to Athlons up to the Athlon64 (~2005) which can't handle Google Chrome and which are out of the range for PCem to emulate a fast machine in anyway. Pentium 4's always had SSE2 from their disasterous 2000 launch. Browsers are fine for these if you don't tab it up or flash it up and don't run into ajax-creep pages. Emulating PentiumMMX 166s with AWE32 and 3dfx cards are not.

Currently the only SSE code in PCem is in the sid player afaik, and I wouldn't mind it if it suddenly started requiring SSE2 for hand-tuned intrinsics and optimization reasons.

Thank you for telling me. Why were Pentium 4 based-PCs a disaster in their late 2000 launch?

Pentium 4 didn't have as good cycles-per-clock as Pentium III or the Athlon Thunderbird. There was a lot of reluctancy for the first Willamettes, and Intel wanted to have a GHz marketing race. There's also all those rambus issues.

I do have a P4 Willamette w/ RDRAM intentionally rebuilt as a period piece (Geforce2, WinME, PCI128, etc) that could work as the slowest SSE2 machine for this survey

It makes no sense to run a PC emulator on such old machines(pre-Pentium 4). I have a Toshiba SS 2000 laptop which was powered by Tualatin Pentium III 750MHz. The CPU speed is 40% or so when emulating PC XT 4.77.

I don't plan to run this program on any computers I have that lack SSE3 even. Almost say in a couple more years you could start optimizing for SSE3. I do not have anything that is SSSE3 capable though. Well one i5 system that does not work but other than that lol.

My two main PCs right now are a Phenom II and a Athlon II based system nothing else as I said above do I plan to use this program on. In the next couple years time I plan to have a new Laptop and Desktop so at that point not likely to be using these other two systems for much of anything including this program.

Really looking forward to having a single system that can play everything PC. Thank you for your service and helping me towards a future in which I am not swapping out caps on my old motherboards to relive my childhood.